On 23.01.2019 14:03, Kees Cook wrote: > This adds a new plugin "stackinit" that attempts to perform unconditional > initialization of all stack variables Hello Kees! Hello everyone! I was curious about the performance impact of the initialization of all stack variables. So I did a very brief test with this plugin on top of 4.20.5. hackbench on Intel Core i7-4770 showed ~0.7% slowdown. hackbench on Kirin 620 (ARM Cortex-A53 Octa-core 1.2GHz) showed ~1.3% slowdown. This test involves the kernel scheduler and allocator. I can't say whether they use stack aggressively. Maybe performance tests of other subsystems (e.g. network subsystem) can show different numbers. Did you try? I've heard a hypothesis that the initialization of all stack variables would pollute CPU caches, which is critical for some types of computations. Maybe some micro-benchmarks can disprove/confirm that? Thanks! Best regards, Alexander
